Magazine

SUNDAY – 11/18/18

03:35 PM

The HRL campus will be open starting tomorrow, Monday, 11/19/18 at 6 a.m.

All personnel should report to work during regular 1st shift hours. We will not have a 2nd shift this week.

The roads are open, but be prepared to show your HRL ID on Malibu Canyon Road. Topanga Canyon and PCH from the east are open as well. Kanan and PCH @ Point Dume are still closed.

Notify your supervisor if you are still displaced or otherwise unable to drive to campus.

The café will be closed on Monday, 11/19/18 for cleaning and stocking food. Please bring your lunch tomorrow or plan to go out into Malibu.

The café will serve breakfast and lunch on Tuesday and Wednesday, but will not be able to provide catering all week. The Corner Bakery, Ralphs and other Malibu businesses are open for catering needs.

There are a few things to know about the campus as we start back up tomorrow:

Our cleaning staff went through and wiped down general purpose areas, The Hub, The Dining Center, offices and cubicles. If your office was locked, it may not have been cleaned. Submit a Facilities work order if needed.

All general use HRL fridges were cleaned and all food was dumped. Anyone who has a personal fridge in their office needs to dispose of anything left in it. We recommend throwing away any food left in offices or desks.

The heliport is being used by SCE to replace power poles in the burned areas. The heliport parking lot is closed and please try to avoid parking in lot 7 below the heliport. The helicopters are very active in this area.

Building 761 (green building at the top of the hill) and the road leading to it are closed. Please avoid the burned areas.

Stay on regular driveways and paths. Do not hike in the burned areas until further notice.

As business starts back up on campus, remember to submit facilities requests/issues through the Facilities work order system, and any IT needs through the IT helpdesk.

If there are questions or concerns for EH&S, call x4747. Remember that x3333 is only for emergencies.

FRIDAY – 11/16/18

05:10 PM

We are expecting the Malibu Canyon road closure to be lifted some time Sunday night or early Monday morning. PCH is open up to Corral Canyon, which means we can access the site, however, we are told the road could close again over the weekend.

Over the weekend, the groups (e.g. Facilities, IS, EHS, Security, ESG) will be preparing the facility for re-occupancy. A limited number of essential personnel THAT HAVE BEEN CLEARED BY THEIR SUPERVISORS AND SUBMITTED TO SECURITY, will be allowed to come on site to assess the labs and start up laboratory equipment or to perform other critical activities. All essential personnel must be cleared by their supervisor and submitted to Security BEFORE coming to the campus. Please discuss with your supervisor BEFORE making any plans to come to HRL. Please do not come on site this weekend unless you are authorized to do so – you will not be allowed on campus without advance authorization.

We have found that the news reports about open roads have not been completely reliable. The information posted on the emergency website, company emails and Smartnotices will provide accurate information. Please follow those directions.

We will keep you updated as more information becomes available. This is a fluid situation so we appreciate your patience as we work to reopen the facility.

THURSDAY – 11/15/18

10:00 AM

The HRL campus made it through the fire with no fire damage to the buildings or infrastructure. We were very lucky!

Facilities is in the process of bringing up the infrastructure and cleaning the facility. We had some water damage in D-wing due to fire lines breaking. EH&S is onsite and working with the team to make sure the campus is safe for us to return.

Operations will be reaching out to departments about laboratories and equipment startup today and tomorrow.

The roads are still closed, do not try to come to the campus. We are preparing to have the campus ready for all-hands return to work on Monday.

All of these departments are very busy right now, please coordinate questions or requests through your management instead of direct to the staff. We won’t be able to address individual requests at this time.

The heliport will be used for the next couple of weeks by SCE for pole replacement. The heliport will be closed to parking during this time.

WEDNESDAY – 11/14/18

10:22 AM

The following Labor charge codes are to be used for week ending 11/16/2018 (and can be selected from the dropdown on your timecard):

Use ND9G.UNW.000000 – for work time lost due to the fire

Use ND9G.WRK.000000 – if you were able to on work fire related activities (e.g. equipment shutdown/restart, clean-up, etc.)

Overarching charging guidance is to charge any reasonable downtime to the special charge number, including not being able to work, inefficiency resulting from working off site, connectivity issues, etc. Charge to your normal charge line to the extent you can perform productive work, otherwise use ND9G.UNW.000000. For vendors, use of the unworked charge code – ND9G.UNW.000000 – will be limited to be to the extent they cannot perform productive work, they are authorized to charge their normally scheduled hours.

Reminder: For those on a 9/80 schedule, make sure to maintain the correct charging practice during this time

Note on the charging of PTO: If PTO was previously scheduled for this week, it should be charged unless the employee was impacted by the fire to the extent their plans had to be canceled. Please use your judgement to have the charging accurately reflect the situation.

As a reminder, timecards are due on Friday to your manager by 10:00am – with manager approval by noon. — HRL Timekeeping

TUESDAY – 11/13/2018

04:20 PM

A MESSAGE FROM PARNEY

HRL family:

This past week has been a source of fear and anxiety for the HRL family, and yet also a source of inspiration.

To my knowledge one family completely lost their home; there may be others that I don’t know about. Even a single case is heartbreaking. More have had close calls, with the fire coming in some cases to within just a few feet of their home. And, of course, many have evacuated and are staying with out of town friends and family, staying in hotels, or in shelters. Despite all of that, no one as far as I know has been physically harmed.

The HRL site has fared well. While there have been chronic flare-ups and jot spots, none of the buildings have been threatened.

Dealing with those flare-ups (among other things) has been a dedicated on-site crew of HRL’s Security, IT and Facilities teams, as well as Boeing’s Fire Dept based in El Segundo. Our IT infrastructure has stayed functional for most of this period. Critical electric power has remained available. Our classified facilities (and data) have remained secure. To the extent that they have been able to get home at all, it’s been for a quick shower, a nap, a trip to the store for supplies (no one is delivering pizza in Malibu!), and then meeting a Boeing fire truck at 0600 to get back through the roadblocks. Their dedication and professionalism is inspiring.

Once it became clear that the earliest the evacuation order in Malibu would be lifted would be late Wednesday, we decided to stay closed through Friday, since it would take at least two days to clean up the soot, ash, clogged filters, etc. and then perform an orderly restart. Currently it is my expectation that we will all be able to return to work Monday.

Everyone will be paid this week; for those of you unable to fill out a time card we used placeholder information that we will sort out later.

As we all return to our homes and to work over the next few days we should all be grateful that we dodged a bullet, but also deeply mindful that portions of the community we live and work in were far less fortunate.

—Parney

09:40 AM

The HRL property continues to be safe. Mandatory evacuation in Malibu is still in place. Red flag warnings and high winds continue through tomorrow afternoon.

HRL campus will be closed through Friday 11/16/18. Those that can work from home or a remote location should do so. If you are unable to do productive work from home, use charge number ND9G.UNW.000000. Make sure to coordinate with your supervisor.

The data center is fully functional again and the IT department is working on the remaining services. Please be patient with the team and send all requests for support through the helpdesk.

Thank you to everyone who has offered support to the brave team that has been protecting HRL. They are doing very well, they have the supplies they need and are able to get some rest.

We will update the emergency webpage as new information is available. Please continue to check in below to let us know that you are safe. www.hrl.com/emergency or http://emergency.hrl.com.
Make sure you refresh the page to get the latest info.

MONDAY – 11/12/2018

03:00 PM

HRL is safe at this time. Boeing Fire, air drops and multiple City and County fire departments are responding to hot spots around campus.

At 3:00pm today, all IT services will go down to perform necessary electrical work. We expect to start bringing IT back up this evening with everything restored tomorrow morning. All efforts are being made to get this work completed as soon as possible.

01:45pm

We will begin shutting down all IT systems that are on at 1:45pm in order to transfer power back to the UPS and off of the diesel generator. It will take about an hour to power down, then Rian and Nathan will do their work, and we will begin powering on.

Let me know if you have any questions. 310-317-5529 — Peter Molina

12:00 PM

Quick update from overnight: there were a couple of hot spots around the facilities – not on campus – and the fire department handled them immediately. Boeing Fire is back on site. More fuel is on its way so the data center should be fine all day.

Email and VPN services are back online.

The VPN emergency license boost is in place. Please let anyone that could not log into VPN previously because of the lack of seats know that they can now login.

Unanet Single Sign On is not functioning at the moment. If you are having trouble accessing it, please use Internet Explorer or Firefox and enter your credentials to login to Unanet. http://una2/unanet/action/home

Full system restoration is still on hold as we work with facilities to discuss the current power situation and determine the best path forward to minimize outages to full recovery.

Currently, we have only restored finance systems in order to ensure that timecards can be entered and payroll can be processed.

Everyone should act like today is business as usual, unless personnel can’t work from home. The leadership team is still deciding whether or not to take this week out of the 9/80 rotation.

TIMEKEEPING

If you have not done so already, please submit your timecard this morning. If you were able to work from home, use your normal charge code.

Please note that 2 new charge codes have been added to all employees timecards as follows:

Use ND9G.UNW.000000 for work time lost due to the fire

Use ND9G.WRK.000000 if you were able to on work fire related activities (e.g. equipment shutdown/restart, clean-up, etc.)

The charge number can be selected from the dropdown on your timecard. — Timekeeping

SUNDAY – 11/11/2018

08:59 PM

Our campus continues to be safe. With the support of the Boeing firefighting support team, our emergency response team continues to keep vigil over the campus.

07:14 PM

We have confirmation that HRL is doing okay right now. Security staff is still on premises. No immediate threat. Please check back soon for additional updates. Thank you.

06:24 PM

Around 1 PM today, a new wave of flames came down the mountain ridge parallel to Malibu Canyon Road. There were multiple retardant and water drops by DC10’s and helicopters to slow the advance of the fire. Our campus is being guarded by our security team and a few other AMAZING HRL staffers. They are keeping our campus safe so far.

We will try to keep you posted with accurate information as we receive it.

Thank you for continuing to check in. Please check in below on the blog post so we know how you are doing, whether: checking in safe, in need of housing, in need of food/water, etc.

We are here to help as a community. We are watching.

Please continue to check this page for updates.

12:30 PM

The cogen in 250 is now offline. We are trying to keep the data center open but we will most likely lose VPN and email service.

Please continue to check this page for updates.

12:10 PM

We have opened up the HRL blog below so employees can check in and come together as a community.

If you are safe, please let us know. If you need shelter or help, please let us know.

We can help each other.

Please scroll down to the bottom of this page and click to reply to the open thread: Employee Check In (CLICK THIS LINK)

SATURDAY – 11/10/2018

11:57 AM

The HRL property is doing well so far.

On Friday there were flare-ups that came through the Kanan corridor behind building 761. It slowed down last night, with more flare-ups this morning. Flare-ups have occurred through the western perimeter of the campus, to the area below building 254, where the fire was a couple of weeks ago. Our staff, Boeing Fire and the County Fire Department have been successful in fighting these fires. The wind has died down and we are preparing for another round of high winds tomorrow.

The generators have been fully fueled and will be able to function through the outage. The cogens are functioning.

HRL campus will be closed through Tuesday, 11/13, however, those that can work from home or a remote location should do so. If you are unable to do productive work from home, a charge number will be issued shortly.

Timecards from last week must be filled out and signed by Monday afternoon at the latest. If you are unable to fill out your timecard, please notify your supervisor.

FRIDAY – 11/09/2018

6:25 PM

We are still under mandatory evacuation and HRL will remain closed tomorrow. Only essential staff will be allowed on campus.

5:40 PM

IT has the following back in service:

Unanet

Costpoint

OnBase

Legal IP

Legal NDAs

3:06 PM

VPN and Internet services are back up. Users should only stay connected to VPN as needed and not to remain connected for extended sessions.

We are continuing to work on the restoration of other services. There is no ETA at this time for other systems.

Timecard submission is deferred until Monday morning, and payroll will be processed on Friday as usual.

Charging guidance for today will be provided soon.

Stay safe.

10:01 AM

HRL is experiencing intermittent IT issues, to include the emergency notification website. Updates will be sent via SmartNotice as warranted.

08:25 AM

HRL will be closed today. Please coordinate with your supervisor if you need more information.

IT is aware of issue with the server room and we have interment services and due to evacuation in Malibu we don’t have an ETA and security can’t update information.

Please check back as information will be updated as its available.

07:41 AM

HRL is closed Friday – do not go to work. Check this page for updates and more information.

05:21 AM

As of now, HRL facilities are operational and will be open for business today. We understand however that many of our staff have been evacuated from their homes and that major highways in the area are closed. If it is not safe for you to access the facility or you have personal emergencies to attend to, please contact your supervisor and make arrangements for PTO or offsite work arrangements today.

Our security staff is onsite and continues to monitor the situation closely. We will send out updates about the facility as warranted.